Technically it’s now Thursday, but pfft, doesn’t count as a new day until I’ve slept, right?!

What have you recently finished reading?

Cassandra Khaw’s Find Me Where It Ends, which I’m going to find difficult to review and talk about because it’s profoundly a book I don’t think it was a good idea for me to read. It’s about suicide, and while there’s an amount of metaphor going on with the black dog that shows up to let the women of Antigone’s family know they’re going to die, and the fact that she welcomes it into her home… it’s also very much not a metaphor, and suicide is woven through the whole book. Read with care if you have any mental health issues — if I thought too hard about this one I know I’d end up feeling very, very anxious, and those who struggle with low mood and suicidal ideation might struggle as well.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve actually finished most of the books I was rotating through, and am about to figure out the next batch to be on deck. The only one I didn’t finish yet that I’ve got a decent way into is Charlotte Booth’s Voices of the Nile. A lot of the info is familiar to me, but then there are titbits that aren’t, e.g. the discussion of same-sex relationships in ancient Egypt and the theories around the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum.

I suspect that the other in-progress books I’m going to resume are Stephanie Burgis’ Wooing the Witch Queen, which I anticipate being fun but maybe a bit agonising for me with the mistaken identity thing and waiting for that to be found out, and Carwyn Graves’ Welsh Food Stories. I’m very curious about the latter, since I only really know bara brith (sort of like fruitcake), picau ar y maen (Welsh cakes) and cawl (soup).

What will you be reading next?

Probably volume three of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, which just came out and is even now winging its way to me, and/or volume two of Lv He Qian Ye’s The Wife Comes First. I’m eager about both. There’s also an outside chance I’ll read volume three of Priest’s Guardian, which I also just got and completes that series.